


Have We Done Asgard Yet?

by HelloBenjamin



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Asgard, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-19
Updated: 2014-03-19
Packaged: 2018-01-16 07:06:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1336492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HelloBenjamin/pseuds/HelloBenjamin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Standing in the doorway, curls flying around her head, is none other than that enigmatic professor he met in the Library. The woman who died saving him and four thousand others. The woman who claimed to be from his future and who is standing in his bloody TARDIS with her damned smug I know more than you do face!<br/>“Damn it, I’ve arrived too early.” River Song glances up at him, eyes raking up and down him as her face morphed into something more akin to a deer in headlights than anything else. “Much too early. This isn’t even the right face!”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Have We Done Asgard Yet?

“Donna!”

The Doctor skids into the control room and pranced around the center console, flipping switches and pressing buttons.

“Come on! I wanna take you to the Ritz hotel. Only place to party. I was thinking 1920s. Or maybe the 40s, depending on how I get the TARDIS to land. Donna! Where are yo-” the Doctor stops pumping the on the wibbly lever midway. Donna wasn’t coming down. Of course she wasn’t, she was gone. She had forgotten him. He had forgotten that for a moment. He forgot that she forgot, funny how that happens.

“Never mind then,” he whispers to himself, his hand moving to half-heartedly fiddle with another switch.

_BZZPT_

The zapping noise shakes the Doctor out his stupor. He whirls around towards the source of the sound around near the TARDIS door and nearly dies of shock from the form in the clearing smoke.

Standing in the doorway, curls flying around her head, is none other than that enigmatic professor he met in the Library. The woman who died saving him and four thousand others. The woman who claimed to be from his future and who is _standing in his bloody TARDIS with her damned smug_ I know more than you do _face!_

“Damn it, I’ve arrived too early.” River Song glances up at him, eyes raking up and down him as her face morphed into something more akin to a deer in headlights than anything else. “Much too early. This isn’t even the right face!”

“ _River!?_ What the hell are you doing here?!”

“I’m sorry. I was aiming for a much later version of you. Just… just how early is this for you?”

“Oh, well. Umm…” the Doctor nervously tugs on his ear, unsure how to answer.

River swallows hard before continuing, “Okay then. Exactly how many times have you seen me?”

“Ahh, oh, well… Once,” he responds, “But it was a good once.”

River stands in silence for a time, looking as if her entire world had just been pulled out from under her. It probably has, the Doctor thinks.

She suddenly comes out of her stupor, a mask of indifference rising up to cover her previous distraught as she starts pressing at the vortex manipulator the Doctor has only now noticed around her wrist.

“I’ll just go, then. No need to keep you. I’ll be on my way,” she says brightly. Almost too brightly.

“River! Wait!”

The Doctor’s exclamation catches both of them by surprise. But the Doctor can’t help himself. It’s just… River’s face when she realized he didn’t really know her. And he just didn’t want to stand around in the TARDIS with the ghosts of all he’s lost. And anyway, it’ll be a good chance to try and find out some things about this enigma of a woman. Like finding out how she got her hands on a Time Agent’s vortex manipulator, for starters.

River’s hand stops moving over her wrist, but she does not remove it as she slowly looks up at him and asks a hesitant, “Yes?”

“Why don’t you stay awhile? I think I’m old enough for us to do something together. Even if I barely know you.” He leans a hand out to rest it on the console in a totally suave way, but misjudges the distance between him and it and ends up flailing around for a few seconds before finally landing awkwardly on the console.

River doesn’t hold back a laugh and is hunched over in stitches over his display. The Doctor suppresses a smile. Perhaps it worth the screw-up just to see her laugh.

“And what exactly do you propose we do?” she asks, still trying to stop her laughing.

“W-we could do…” he pauses, realizing he doesn’t even have the slightest idea what he could even do with her.

Suddenly, he remembers something she said when he met her. When she had pulled her little blue book out and started questioning him, trying to figure out where he was with her.

_Oh, picnic at Asgard, Have we done Asgard yet?”_

“Picnic at Asgard!” the Doctor shouts, waving a hand out in front of him, pointing at nothing in particular.

River looks at him skeptically, crossing her arms in front of her. “Picnic at Asgard?”

Less sure now, the Doctor goes on, “Yeah! I mean, why not. It’ll be fun! Come on. Fancy a picnic?” He waggles an eyebrow at her.

River grins at this and the Doctor can’t help but grin back.

“Okay then, picnic at Asgard!” she exclaims and much to the Doctor’s surprise, crosses over to the console and starts messing with the controls.

“Um… What are you doing?”

“Oh, like I’m going to let you fly her by yourself. I’d like to actually get where we’re going, thank you.”

“You can fly the TARDIS?” the Doctor asks. Where the hell did she learn to fly the TARDIS?

“Of course!” she replies, looking at him like he was an idiot. “My, these are early days for you.”

“But how?!” exclaims the Doctor.

River grins, “Spoilers. Mind you, it’s all a bit harder than usual given that the controls are a tangled mess. And just look at the room, it’s a mess! Everything’s all rusty and old looking. And the grating floor? Really?”

“Oi! If you’re gonna be rude, you can just go ahead and leave.”

“Sorry Honey, but you’re stuck with me now.”

Wait, was she flirting with him?

The Doctor sighs. “So I take it I’ve got a different desktop in the future.”

“Spoilers!” she shouts as she pulls on a lever with more flair than the Doctor finds necessary, “Now go make yourself useful and pack a picnic for us.”

 

The pair walk across a field with the perfect view of a shining golden city in the distance.

“So where did you get a vortex manipulator? And more importantly _why_ would you use one? They’re rubbish!” The Doctor earns a glare from River. “I was being rude, wasn’t I? Bit uncalled for.”

River laughs, “A girl can’t wait around all the time for a blue box to turn up on her doorstep. As for where I got it, I acquired it from Dorium Maldovar.”

“Dorium!” the Doctor say excitedly, “There’s a bloke who’d help you out in a pinch. Well, I say help. If the price is right. Still, should be fine for me. He owes me a favor. How is he, by the way?”

They stop and the Doctor sets down the picnic basket he’d been carrying. River bends down and starts shifting through it.

“Oh, you know, getting ahead in life,” she responds before looking up crossly at him, “And you forgot to grab a blanket! What good are you?”

The Doctor slips off his overcoat and spreads it across the ground.

“How’s that?” he asks.

“Hmm, I suppose it’ll have to do,” she replies. There is just no pleasing some people.

River sits on one side of the coat, leaving enough room for the Doctor, and starts pulling food out of the basket. The Doctor stretches out across the space River left him, lounging back, propped up on one elbow, and takes a banana from the assortment of food.

He takes a bite from it and asks, “So. Was there any particular reason for you trying to find an older version of me?” he swallows, “Or did you just fancy a visit?”

“I just…” River gazes off in the distance and doesn’t speak for a bit. The Doctor is beginning to think she’s not going to answer when she shifts her gaze down to his coats lining and continues.

“I lost my… a couple of close friends recently and I was looking for a version of you who’d know what I was going through.”

“I’m sorry. So sorry,” the Doctor says in sympathy.

He gives her a few moments before asking, “No chance you’re gonna go further into that, is there?”

She looks up at him with a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes.

“Spoilers,” she says, sadly.

The Doctor sighs, “I’ve lost someone too. Not to compete on personal loss,” he pauses, “Donna, her name was. Donna Noble. I ever mention her before?”

“I think you’ve mentioned her before, though you never went in much detail. What happened to her?”

“She underwent a metacrisis with my hand. My hand, I lost it just after regenerating into this body. It got cut off. I grew a new one. Anyway. The hand turned into a full, human double of me and Donna took in my mind. All my knowledge and memories packed into her own fragile mind. The DoctorDonna.”

“Except that would be impossible. Having the mind of a Time Lord in her own mind. It’d burn her!” River states.

“And it would’ve. But I erased it. All her memories of me. And if she ever remembers any of our time together… she’ll die.” He stares sadly at the banana in his hand. He quickly sits up. “Anyway. We’ve got a nice lovely picnic, let’s not let it go to waste.”

They talk for hours picking food out off and on. There’s plenty of food, of course. The Doctor had the TARDIS make it, so naturally it’s bigger on the inside. Before he knows it, it’s dusk, but he doesn’t care. Every minute with River was perfect, just perfect, although he just couldn’t think why.

“Two months of being human and what’s the first thing I taste? _Pears_. I wake up with pear residue all in my mouth because human me had to go do something stupid and eat a pear. And after specifically telling Martha not to let me eat any pears!” He reaches into the basket and, at random, pulls out a pear. He stares at it in disgusted irony before tossing it back in the basket.

“So what happened next? Did you go after the Family?” River asks.

“Yep. Tricked them into thinking I was still human and destroyed their ship. And then I gave them what they wanted. Immortality. Trapped forever in their own individual hells.”

“So what happened with the matron? I think she’d be heartbroken after that.”

“She was, the Doctor says and lays back, “Asked her to travel with me. She said no. I just wasn’t who she fell in love with. I think her great granddaughter wrote a book from that journal, though. I might go buy a copy.”

River lays down on the coat beside the Doctor. Neither says a word and they both lay there in silence for several minutes. Eventually, much to the Doctor’s surprise, River curls into him, draping herself along him, head falling into the crook of his neck.

He squirms against her, unsure about this new development.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Have we not done this before?” She lifts her head up and looks at his face. It must have held an answer for her because she starts to lift up off of him muttering something about not thinking straight and how she shouldn’t press him.

“No, no, it’s alright.” He reaches around her pulls her back into him. She obliges, sinking thankfully back into him. His hand moves up to her vivacious hair and he strokes it and wraps the curls around his fingers. “It’s fine. It’s _nice._ I like this.”

He shouldn’t, though. He shouldn’t like this. Couldn’t like her. He should stay away from her. Run as fast as he can. He’s better off alone, he knows that. He couldn’t let himself get attached to anyone else. Especially her. He already knows how it will end for her. If he continues on like this, he knows there will be no way he’d be able to bare that.

But still, she’s warm and soft and fits almost perfectly with him. _Just almost, not quite there, though._ And he can feel her already drifting off to sleep. And he just can’t bring himself to pull away from her. He feels himself drifting off, too. Funny though, Time Lords don’t need as much sleep and he not even tired. At least he tries to convince himself of that just before he slips into a content slumber.

_BZZTHOOOOOM_

The sudden noise starts the Doctor awake. He blinks up at the bright morning sky which is marred by a large bloom of ship exhaust.

“Blimey, what the hell was _that_?!” he exclaims as he and River clamber up on their feet.

“I don’t know, but it’s heading straight towards the city.”

“We should go. Who knows what that thing could be,” the Doctor says. He bends down and picks up his coat and shakes it off.

“No, I’m not leaving till I know what it is,” River replies.

“You sure? Could be dangerous.”

“Oh, it better be.”

The Doctor smiles at her and she smiles back.

“Well then, Professor Song.” He slips his jacket on and puts a hand out for her. “I’d rather like to accompany you on this possibly dangerous expo. Safety in numbers and all that.”

“Well, with you there, somebody’s gonna have keep you out of trouble. And it’ll probably have to be me.”

“Oi, it’s not like I go looking for trouble. It usually finds me.” He thrusts his hand out again, with more emphasis. “Come on! Once more unto the breach.”

River takes his hand this time. “Oh Sweetie, you don’t have to ask me twice.”


End file.
